Red
by the ticking clock
Summary: ...or What You Don't Know About Natasha Rommanoff.
1. Chapter 1

**She has only ever said, "I love you" to one person. **And it's Clint.

**She hates killing. **It's a little ironic, considering her line of work, but when she looks into a person's eyes and sees how completely _human _they are, how they are just like her, how everything about them is screaming, _I don't want to die_ she doesn't want to kill them. But she has too. And sometimes she thinks it's going to destroy her.

**She wants to believe in fairytales. **Maybe then she could be sure that there is _something _in this world that isn't corrupted or dangerous

**She can only tolerate being called by her real name by a select group of people. **Clint, because hearing him whisper _Natasha _in her ear calms her down, and Agent Coulson, because aside from Clint he was her very first friend. Sometimes she let's the other Avengers call her Natasha, but only Clint gets to call her _Nat. _

**Sometimes she's not sure what is real and what isn't. **At night everything blurs together, half remembered dreams and visions and hopes crowding in and consuming her mind until she doesn't know if she wants to scream or cry.

**She hates spiders. **Clint didn't believe her when she told him at first, but she can't stand them. Maybe it's because they remind her a little of herself.

**She laughs and smiles more than anyone would think. **It just takes something particularly amusing to coax a real laugh out of her, and the Avengers are very good at that.

**She doesn't really think love is for children. **And if it is, she wants to be a child, not an assassin covered in red.

**She likes to read. **It helps her relax after missions, a good book and Clint's hand in hers.

**She remembers Budapest with fondness. **Clint remembers it with terror.

**Tony Stark is the only one capable of making her want to hug and kill someone at the same time. **She will never admit it to anyone, but Stark is someone she might call a friend.

**Every night, she wishes on a star. **And she hopes that her wish will come true, even if she knows it's stupid.


	2. Chapter 2

**She likes to sing. **Even if it's just a soft whisper under her breath, she sings every night before she goes to sleep. She's not quite sure why, but there's something soothing about it.

**She thinks Bruce Banner is a genius. **Many people give credit to Tony Stark for being the brains of the Avengers, but she knew that the real genius on the team was Bruce, and not just because he is a scientist, but because he knew how to have perfect control over his emotions, and she admires that.

**She admires Loki. **She's not quite sure why, but there is an understanding between them. Loki knows how she thinks, and she knows how his mind works as well. They are both so in tune with each other, in tune with the wild patterns of their thoughts. Loki is the only other person who knows how to manipulate and use his words to achieve what he wants the way Natasha does, and they understand that about each other. She hates him, of course, but she can't help but admire his wit.

**Pepper is her friend, and she admires her. **Anyone who can have at least a little authority over Tony Stark is their own kind of hero to her.

**She trusts Clint to save her. **From anything and everything. From herself, from guns, from danger, from aliens, she trusts Clint to always have her back. That's what partners do.

**She thinks Steve Rogers is the best thing that could have happened at S.H.E.I.L.D **Everyone knows that Captain America leads the Avengers(unofficially) but it is Steve that keeps the team together. Steve with his quiet smile and gentle words. Not one of the Avengers could survive without him, and she respects that fact.

**Sometimes, she wishes that she could have had a normal childhood. **When she sees children on the street, and their running and laughing and playing-not a care in the world-and she's almost jealous. She never had that.

**She likes the color Red. **Clint finds this very ironic, but it's true. She loves Roses. She loves her own reddish hair. It's the color of fire. And fire means power. In a way, she's always respected the color, and although it doesn't look as good on her as black, she loves the shade against her skin.

**She can count on her fingers the number of times she's cried in front of someone. **And more often than not, that person is Clint. He's the only one who's really seen her tears. And she plans to keep it that way.


	3. Chapter 3

**Sometimes, she envies Thor. **Because he had a brother, once. She has never had anyone.

**Clint is the only one who knows how to take care of her on a mission. **Sure, Dr. Banner is skilled with the medical side of things, but when it comes to Natasha's injuries, it is Clint who she wants by her side. Because most of her hurts are not physical, and only Clint, Clint, not Hawkeye, can understand how to help her. So even when her blood is staining the ground and Stark is shouting for medics and Banner is trying to put pressure on the wound, Clint is calm. He sits by her head and runs a hand through her hair, strokes her cheek. Just before her eyes drift close, his lips are at her ear: "Remember Budapest?"

She smiles.

**She thinks that the Avengers are the closest thing she's ever had to a real family. **And she's not quite sure if that's a good thing, or if it's going to destroy her.

**No one knows who she really is. **Not even the Avengers, or Coulson. Sometimes, not even Clint. Because she is Natasha, wild and impulsive, and a trained assassin and a killer since childhood, and she has dark secrets that no one will ever, _ever _know.

**She remembers every man she's killed. **Not their names. But their faces, all of their desperate, haunting faces flash behind her eyes when she goes to sleep at night.

**Clint was the first person to make her laugh, truly laugh, in years. **She had laughed before, of course, but those had been false. Harsh and unhappy sounds that she coaxed forth because it was expected. But Clint made her laugh from her soul. And she loved him for it.

**She hates black coffee. **It needs cream and sugar.

**She secretly wants to ask Fury what happened to his eye. **But whenever she starts to, Clint elbows her, hard, and the words always die on her lips.

**She's afraid to die. **After looking death in the face her entire life, she's terrified to even think about letting it take her forever.

**She loves cats. **

**Sometimes, when it's late at night and she can't sleep, she goes to the highest point of Stark Tower and imagines what it would be like to fly. **She thinks it must be peaceful, to feel the wind rushing around you like that, to feel so completely free and alone. Unstoppable.

**She believes in heroes. **And the Avengers are some of them.


	4. Chapter 4

**She never wakes up screaming.** She has nightmares, of course, they all do, but she never wakes up screaming. She's heard Tony and Steve, and even though they wake sobbing and screaming in the middle of the night, but she never does. She wakes silently, and wrestles with her emotions in the dark. Clint comes up behind her, and croons a Russian lullaby in her ear, and she never says a word.  
**Her favorite part of missions are the nights.** When the darkness cloaks her and she can run and run and run and feel free.  
Out of all the Avengers other than Clint, Tony is the one she can relate to the most. But she will never let him know. Ever.  
**She hates funerals.** She has grown up with death. She doesn't need to make a party about it. Doesn't need to be comforted by hundreds of people who really don't care. She has her own ways of mourning.  
**She's read Harry Potter over 20 times**. She's on her twenty-first, on the fifth book.  
**Her favorite weapon is her words**. She knows from experience that words hurt more than sticks or stones any day.  
**Her strength is also her weakness.** Those three words: Barton's been compromised. Shattered her wall of strength and ferocity. But it is also in her partner that she finds the strength to fight like the devil.  
**Coulson was her first friend.** Her only friend, really. He had been the first person to see her not as a wild assassin, but as a person. He had helped her see that too, and she will always be grateful for that.  
**She loves the rain.** It's almost as if the world is crying for all the destruction and death that go on in it. It makes her feel important. She's alive, today. She lived to see another rainstorm. That has to count for something.


	5. Chapter 5

**At night, when the nightmares are too strong and she can't sleep, she wakes up Clint. **And they train. They punch and kick and grapple and yell, moving in perfect synch. They never speak; their battle is their language, and they do not need words. But at the end when they are both exhausted and fall into bed, Clint's bright eyes on her in the dark whisper, _it will get better soon. _

And the next morning they get up and do it all over again.

**Her favorite season is winter. **It reminds her of home.

**Banner sometimes makes her uncomfortable. **And it's not the knowledge that at any moment he could turn into a green monster. It's his eyes, that seem to look at her and pierce right through her mask. Maybe it's because he's a scientist. He's used to looking at broken, wrecked things.

**She loves the Avengers. **they've become her family. But she doesn't let anyone know. she's learned that the world takes those you love, and she doesn't want to lose any of them.


	6. Chapter 6

**She didn't want to let herself love Clint at first. **"Love is for children," She had said, cooly and quietly, and had turned away from him.

He had touched her arm, and when she reluctantly raised her eyes to his, she saw that he was smiling. "So let's be children."

**She lays flowers on Coulson's grave. **It's terribly sentimental and not at all like her, but he was her first friend. One of her only friends. And he deserves a white lily by his head and not dirty brown grass. So she sets the flower down every wednesday, along with a bag full of signed Captain America cards.

**She is generally sympathetic towards Stark most of the time. **But she rarely shows it. One of the things she's learned from personal experience is after a night of flashback and nightmares, that he wants to be left alone. But when she sees him drinking coffee with dark circles under his eyes, his hair a rumpled mess and his hands trembling slightly around his mug, she bumps his shoulder and says, "Let's train."

And they punch and kick and grapple until she has him flattened to the ground and he has to fix several dents in his armor.

**She loves the color purple. **

**Children scare her. **They are so loud and bright and happy, and she doesn't know what to say to them when they run to her smiling. She wants to tell them that life won't always be so happy. That darkness and fear and hate will shatter their innocence soon. But she knows she can't, so she forces a small smile and let's Clint do the talking.

**She doesn't wish for peace. **It's strange, she knows, but she is an assassin. If the world was peaceful she wouldn't know what to do with herself. She wouldn't know how to live. Killing is who she is, and she accepted that long ago.

Sometimes it still hurts to think about though.

**The first time she met Stark, she threw him out a window. **And she doesn't regret it.

**Even after all their missions together, she still didn't fully trust the team. **That is, until Steve took a bullet for her, The Hulk saved her from getting crushed by a building, Stark flew her to safety while she was unconscious, and Thor was the first one by her side after she had been slammed to the pavement, and his deep voice was soothing her with an Asgardian lullaby while Clint called for backup.

After all that, she thought that maybe these broken, wild men, could be people she could trust.

**For some reason, ensuring that Clint could speak Russian became a necessity in their partnership. **Maybe it's because they both know the familiar language soothes her in the chaos of battle.

**Her first impression of Clint was an arrow. **It had been pointed straight at her forehead, and he had been ready to kill her.

**At night when no one can see her, she dances around her room. **It helps relieve her stress.

**She doesn't like cities. **She prefers the wilderness or an isolated island somewhere, where she can cloak herself in shadows and soothe her injuries with bitter cold air. Not a stuffy, loud, bright city where someone is always watching you and innocent bystanders get in the way.

**Sometimes, when Thor senses she is angry, he creates a thunderstorm. **And she rages and runs and cries alone with the wild fury of the pounding rain until she is exhausted and Clint pulls her back inside.

**She trains 12 hours a day. **The Loki incident was not something she was ever trained for. But she would train for it now.


	7. Chapter 7

**It only takes three words to break her. **Barton's been compromised.

**She didn't go to fight Clint on the hellcarrier because she loved him. **She fought him because she was terrified. Because she wanted to see for herself what Loki had done to him. Because fighting with Clint never failed to snap her back to reality and she needed that. She fought him because she believed he could bring her back to herself, not because she thought she could save him.

**During a mission, she needs orders. **She's been trained as an assassin for as long as she can remember, and although she can think for herself when she needs to, she ultimately needs commands to keep her focused. She needs someone whispering what she needs to do in her ear.

**She doesn't look her age. **But then again, neither do Thor or Steve.

**Sometimes she hates her job. **Because her job is always to seduce, or to be weak and cower before men she could kill in ten seconds with her bare hands, or with that pen in their pocket, or with her shoelace. But she the women, so it's her job to drag the men into her clutches, get them to spill their dirty secrets. It's always a relief when Coulson gives her the go ahead, and she can knock them out with a punch of a kick. It makes her feel strong again.

**Sometimes Clint terrifies her. **Not because he is an assassin like she is, but because he knows her secrets. That was why Loki's tampering with Clint's mind had unnerved her so much. Because Loki could make Clint do whatever Loki wanted, and if he had told Clint to kill her in the most horrific and personal way possible, Clint would know exactly how to do it.

And sometimes she is reminded late at night, that he almost did.

**It is small things that make her laugh. **Things like Thor's love of Pop Tarts and Banner's fear of spiders. Things like Steve's wonder at the modern world. Things like Stark's ridiculously witty comments. Thing's like Clint slipping on ice. Thing like Coulson laughing over the coms about some movies he's just seen. It's those things that make her feel _alive. _

**She doesn't like music. **Not when she's working. Stark likes to turn JARVIS's speakers up to full blast while they're training, and it annoys her. She needs to hear her own breath and the sound of her opponent to focus. She needs to hear reality, not a song.

**She doesn't keep a journal. **Clint does. He writes down every mission after it's completed. She doesn't need to, though. She remembers them all, like perfect, horrifying pictures flashing through her thoughts and twining through her dreams.

**She hates Christmas. **She likes the quiet of winter. Not bright lights and children hoping for presents from a man who doesn't exist. But maybe it's because she never really had a childhood, that the holiday never quite resonated with her.

**Once, she spent two weeks in a coma. **It was when she first started working for SHIELD. The last thing she remembered was Clint's furious scream and the blur of his arrows singing over her head. And the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was her partner asleep in the chair beside her bed, and Coulson's anxious eyes.

**She never wants to retire. **What would she do with a day of nothing to do and all her memories? It would drive her insane.

**She didn't want to spy, at first. **The prospect had scared her. But when you're a little girl lost and alone, anything is better than another night in the dark.


	8. Chapter 8

**Silence is one of her best weapons. **It only takes one silent, cold look to silence anyone. Even Tony Stark.

**Clint taught her how to shoot a bow. **Before him her weapons consisted mostly of guns, knives, and other, messier tools. She loved archery though, even if she really didn't have the patience for it.

**Sometimes she stays up late talking to Banner. **At first she was the most wary of him, but she's come to learn that he is one of the few people who can see right through her mask. So when she needs someone to be honest with her, she goes to him. He looks at her with those eyes that both seem so gentle and so piercing at the same time, and they talk until she feels so raw and vulnerable that her stress levels nearly cause him to hulk-out.

**When the nightmares haunt her and she can't wake Clint, she talks to Steve. **He's often up anyway, and she finds him sitting painting at the kitchen table. She doesn't need to say anything. He just wordlessly passes her a pencil and paper and together they sketch their nightmares of blood and death and tears and red. Sometimes they speak, sometimes they cry. But she prefers the nights when they don't say anything at all, simply finding comfort in the fact that someone in this broken, damaged, bloody world _understood _the feeling of being out of time and drowning in a see of red.

**Thor is like her little brother, in many ways. **He's childish and young and confused about life. He's almost ridiculously niave. But then there are times when she is reminded of the fact that he is thousands of years old and he's seen civilizations rise and fall.

And in those moments, he makes her feel like the smallest person in the world.

And strangely, she doesn't really mind.


	9. Chapter 9

**She had learned her first lesson in the Red Room. **Show no mercy.

**Her second lesson she learned from an old man who pretended to be kind but wasn't. **Everybody lies.

**Her third lesson, she learned from a rabid dog. **Attack without thought, only instinct.

**Her fourth lesson, she learned from an assassin. **Don't feel. It only makes the job harder.

**Her fifth lesson, she learned from the first man who ever touched her. **The world is a cruel, horrible place.

**Her sixth lesson, she learned in the Red Room. **Blood stains. Red is never washed away.

**Her seventh lesson, she learned in desert. **Survival does not always mean comfort. Survival is a rough, horrible chess match between you and the world. Sometimes the world wins.

**Her eighth lesson, she learned from a crying child in the streets of Shanghai. **Emotions can destroy you. Manipulate them, and they can destroy someone else.

**Her ninth lesson, she learned from Coulson. **There is more to life than mindless killing.

**Her tenth lesson, she learned, and is still learning, from Clint. **It's okay to love, even if it may get them both killed one day, it's okay.


End file.
